His Own People eBook

I. A Change of Lodging

The glass-domed “palm-room” of the Grand
Continental Hotel Magnifique in Rome is of vasty heights
and distances, filled with a mellow green light which
filters down languidly through the upper foliage of
tall palms, so that the two hundred people who may
be refreshing or displaying themselves there at the
tea-hour have something the look of under-water creatures
playing upon the sea-bed. They appear, however,
to be unaware of their condition; even the ladies,
most like anemones of that gay assembly, do not seem
to know it; and when the Hungarian band (crustacean-like
in costume, and therefore well within the picture)
has sheathed its flying tentacles and withdrawn by
dim processes, the tea-drinkers all float out through
the doors, instead of bubbling up and away through
the filmy roof. In truth, some such exit as that
was imagined for them by a young man who remained
in the aquarium after they had all gone, late one
afternoon of last winter. They had been marvelous
enough, and to him could have seemed little more so
had they made such a departure. He could almost
have gone that way himself, so charged was he with
the uplift of his belief that, in spite of the brilliant
strangeness of the hour just past, he had been no fish
out of water.

While the waiters were clearing the little tables,
he leaned back in his chair in a content so rich it
was nearer ecstasy. He could not bear to disturb
the possession joy had taken of him, and, like a half-awake
boy clinging to a dream that his hitherto unkind sweetheart
has kissed him, lingered on in the enchanted atmosphere,
his eyes still full of all they had beheld with such
delight, detaining and smiling upon each revelation
of this fresh memory—­the flashingly lovely
faces, the dreamily lovely faces, the pearls and laces
of the anemone ladies, the color and romantic fashion
of the uniforms, and the old princes who had been
pointed out to him: splendid old men wearing white
mustaches and single eye-glasses, as he had so long
hoped and dreamed they did.

“Mine own people!” he whispered.
“I have come unto mine own at last. Mine
own people!” After long waiting (he told himself),
he had seen them—­the people he had wanted
to see, wanted to know, wanted to be of! Ever
since he had begun to read of the “beau monde”
in his schooldays, he had yearned to know some such
sumptuous reality as that which had come true to-day,
when, at last, in Rome he had seen—­as he
wrote home that night—­“the finest
essence of Old-World society mingling in Cosmopolis.”

Artificial odors (too heavy to keep up with the crowd
that had worn them) still hung about him; he breathed
them deeply, his eyes half-closed and his lips noiselessly
formed themselves to a quotation from one of his own
poems:

While trails of scent, like
cobweb’s films
Slender and faint and rare,
Of roses, and rich, fair fabrics,
Cling on the stirless air,
The sibilance of voices,
At a wave of Milady’s glove,
Is stilled—­